Rufus (and Floyd)

At the risk of seeming like one of those people who does nothing but ramble on about their pets... I'm going to ramble on about my pet. I'll try to be brief.

Rufus is now 11 weeks old. He's changed a lot even since we first brought him home about a month ago. But man, he is still cute.

Rufus gets a little wound up sometimes. He chews on everything like a madman, and needs a lot of attention. We had been consoling ourselves by saying, "Oh, he's just a puppy. All puppies are like that." But last week he started "puppy training" classes. When we brought him in with the other puppies, we were a little surprised and a little dismayed to see that he was one of the more "crazy" puppies in there. Oh well.

As I mentioned before, he's very smart, which I guess is par for the course for his breed. He can already come when called, sit on command, and -- if he's not too distracted -- stay on command. He's also already pretty good at fetch.

It's funny how, just like a child, sometimes it's not the store-bought toys that thrill him the most. He loves, for example, an empty plastic container of laundry detergent. It's about as big as he is, and there's only one place (the handle) that he can bite, but somehow those things make it even more fun for him. He loves to tackle it, push it around on the floor, and even drag it with him around the house. I suppose because it's so big and yet it's so lightweight, it's cool for him to be able to manhandle (puppyhandle) it around.

However, his all-time, number one favorite toy is indeed a storebought one. It's Floyd the little stuffed dragon. Even before we got Rufus, we knew we wanted to get him a stuffed animal. We didn't want to get him a dog toy animal, though, because they all have squeakers in them and if the dog can get the squeaker out he can choke (Rufus has a squeak toy, but he can't use it unsupervised). So we went to the kid's toy section of the store and found Floyd (that's what we called him, anyway -- I don't remember why). He had the dual advantages of being very, very soft and being stuffed with foam, not beans. Pity poor Floyd as Rufus on a daily basis grabs his little pal by the throat and shakes him. Or as he drags him from room to room by the tail, or the ear. In just a few weeks, Floyd's looking pretty shabby, but he's hanging in there. And that's saying something, when your only playmate is a rambunctious puppy.